Second reading
From A Sand County Almanac A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon. Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding pack. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog. High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die. Leopold, Aldo (1966-12-31). A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River (pp. 95-96). Oxford University Press This reading has for me, Ray Phenicie, a profound impact each time I read it. Aldo Leopold was one of the earliest writers in the 20th century to expound on the idea of a land ethic. However the subject goes much deeper than merely the ethical. I hear a deep religious statement. Leopold in the whole of A Sand County Almanac is telling of his personal relationship with the earth and the creatures on it. He was a biologist versed in the ways of science. He successfully bridges the gap between scientific endeavor and a religious view of the world. Indeed, Leopold fuses the two worlds of science and religion but yet magically maintains the seperate threads throughout his work. Gazing at the wonders of the scenic world around us, we may be awestruck and say that the face of God is visible in them. Throughout his book, the writer successfully attaches us to the world so that we see that we are at once in it as well as observing it. We are with Leopold in sering ourselvces, humanity in all of its mixed up wonderful complextiy and naivete, part of the creative force that brought the world into being long eons ago.